IAN JOYCE – OONA HYLAND

We’re in Donegal to meet Ian Joyce and Oona Hyland, who married each other and set up an unlikely but apparently viable artist business here. They are both in the GB, they’ve been holding GB artist meetings, collaborative working sessions.

We’re told to hang round Gortahork and wait for Ian Joyce’s car to arrive. We do. We know nothing about Ian Joyce’s car.

Donegal cars are not as other cars. When you meet them you try to show sympathy and understanding as understandingly as the prevailing winds allow. Eventually you realise that they are just differently able. They really are. They enjoy being lopsided, tattoed, sagging, enlisting the unnecessary sympathies of spectators when they climb a hill. Ian Joyce has been adopted by a Donegal car, a left-hand drive German immigrant car that probably thinks its European accent is intact, its traditions impervious to assimilation, its identity secure. No chance, the mark of Donegal is branded on its German hide. It swaggers around, showing local knowledge of a kind only assimilated strangers command. We suspect it of studying guide books in the garage after dark.

This car guided us to extraordinary places and people, along a route we now retain no useful memory of at all. Next time we go we will need native informants as much as we did this first time, partly because of directional carelessness - when you are being well guided you enjoy abdicating control - partly because of the visual excitement of this, the real interior of Donegal.

Ian Joyce didn’t like to mention it on the phone, but he is moving house today. We see the one the family has just left in amazingly perfect order and the one they are moving into and trying to move the builders out of. Oona Hyland, his wife, is sitting with a very young child in a very large room surrounded by boxes, builders rubble and lots of half-unpacked necessary household stuff. They offer us tea and give us a tour of their domain - workshops in the industrial estate, presses, chromolitography stones, digital cameras, computers.

We walk past the house of Cathal Ó Searcaigh, neighbour and poet. He’s doing a TV interview and interrupts it to say hello. The Joyce-Hylands have a family of guests arriving that evening. The word coping is never mentioned. Coping is a word designed for rigid jaws and stiffened upper lips. We start off home stunned by the beauty of the place, the extraordinary art factory, the welcome. I don’t remember taking any notes or learning anything specific but we did see places – let’s call them locations – and you feel good when you are doing the homework you are supposed to be doing. It’s not always about results, as we allow ourselves to think.

We forget to eat until we meet Derry again - a city, busy, bursting with opportunities to spend money, dance the night away, or at least eat, surely? Well, there was one place open, opposite Maiden City Taxis, you can’t miss it. We got back to Cleggan, gliding along the increasingly rational roads of Co Antrim past the early-bedtime sleepers of Ballymena and the forlorn chipper of Broughshane (Ulster Tidy Towns winner every year since 1690). We sleep well.

 

BEARINGS

We started all this with a sort of Dinshenchas in our head. The Dinshanchas is the ancient Irish gazeteer, a directory of places, placenames and tales. It’s done in stories - prose and verse - and it doesn’t tell you where to go or how to get there; it tells you why to go and who went and did things there.

 

People like me carry, I think, a symbolic map of place and of poems, a map that is Ireland but in another dimension. We read Aideen’s Grave at school, Samuel Ferguson’s Walter Scott-like rattling yarn-lament for Aideen, the wife of Oscar and about her burial on Howth Hill (Beann Edair). Our school was walking distance from the grave in the grounds of Howth Castle. We could relate Howth to Molly Bloom and what she said she did up there, even though we never managed anything like it ourselves, there or anywhere else. Even the Finnegans Wake bit - the beginning - is more or less real. But the old Dindshenchas poems seem to happen in a land we own but can’t ever enter or exactly place.

 

You would expect later literature to have a more secure grip on the map for us but it didn’t. Certainly the map in my head was confused. We knew where Wordsworth was, could be stupidly exact about Westminster Bridge and even Islington – on account of Goldsmith’s mad dog; but most Irish poets were placed only in books and in ‘the country’. The Brothers assumed that Irish poets would always come from the country – ‘down the country’. There is no up-country in Ireland and we don’t have a countryside. We have ‘The Country’ and it was probably no accident that this sounds like the name for the whole nation.

The nature of ‘the country’ was left undefined but felt very definite. The country was more or less anywhere that was not Dublin. Any dealings poets may have had with towns, villages or hamlets only went to show how un-urban a people the really-Irish Irish were. Even Cork, which some Cork people think of as a city, managed to get itself mapped into Rural Ireland.

We had some general ideas. Douglas Hyde’s great collections - Amhrán Grá Cúige Chonnachta (Love Songs of Connaught) – covered a whole province, and one containing a huge variety of people, habitats and history. Daniel Corkery had more or less established that ‘The Hidden Ireland’ was Munster. We were from Dublin, in Lenister, inside The Pale which did not exist any more, except that our teachers seemed to believe that it did, so it might as well have done.

It was a pretty miserable picture but it had its encouraging complications. Our teachers reckoned that there was every chance we might rule the world; one half of their mind was cheering us on; the other half knew well that we were not at all the right kind of people for the job. I think they condensed Irish and its literature to make sure we got it, or got something. And what they did to the map, they did to time. We had hardly any idea of time in Gaelic Literature. Down the country, we were given to understand, there was one kind of person, they lived in a single historical period that never really began but which, unless we were very careful with our conjugations and the dative case, could end with us. Irish history was a highly organised narrative, Irish literature needed no narrative; it just was.

 

I exaggerate, you notice. But we were a bewildered generation. If we had not been, surely we would have been angry enough to protest. But we more or less accepted; we accepted the language; we sometimes even magaged to pity our occasionally violent teachers and also managed not to blame the Irish language for the sins of its stuttering speakers or for the curmudgeons who seemed to be the ones writing poems in our own day.

When we started working out our film, I made a list of Old Bastard poets. An Old Bastard is usually a man, he writes in what is always called ‘Lovely Irish’ – meaning traditional Irish. He thinks things will never be the same again; that his like will never be seen again; that we, the rest of the actual living world, are not like him. And he doesn’t like it or, apparently, like anything much.

 

Recovering from the Old Bastards is part of waking up from the nightmare of Irish History, as Stephen Dedalus had it. But maybe we’ve managed it while we weren’t looking. When I looked again I found no young Old-Bastards taking over the Bastard Position; and even the supply of middle-aged Old-Bastards was not what it used to be. Meanwhile the artists of the Great Book are managing to make even some of the grumpier old poems look attractive and maybe even alive.

As it happens, Scott Kilgour is doing Ó Direáin’s tree poem and is new to the whole business, sees no stubborness, sees only green-ness, sees a certain modesty in a poet volunteering to stand there and maybe provide shade and leafiness for the passer-by. Kilgour, I imagine, has not had to recover from any Christian Brothers and is not bothered by the way the literature has been taught. Would Shakespeare benefit now from some lack of teaching? Maybe we should just work harder at freeing the literature from what time and the usual fools always do to it.

 

On the other hand, I still believe the Old Bastards really were bastards and I don’t really care how Lovely their Irish was.

In the meantime, the Old Bastard poem is certainly getting make-overs that would astonish its friends. On the way to Donegal we had Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s love poems in mind – swift, small things that would rip through you like a small gale. And he has also been up to mischief with the old moanings as well. Ó Direáin’s stoical tree poem is having its dignity gently ruffled

Ó Direáin says he wants to become as a tree but it sounds as though turning into a stone would suit him better. Ó Searcaigh prepares for his tree experience as though dolling himself up for a night on the tiles.

So I revise my map of Gaelic Donegal. It used to be dominated by Seosamh Mac Grianna – we did him in school – and his book An Grá Agus an Gruaim, a book of very fine but very fatalistic stories, full of sorrows that seemed to be eternal. None of Cahal’s sorrows seemed to stand a chance of being eternal and Donegal looked like a much more benificent place when seen through his eyes.

Like it or not, the film would be a Dinshenchas, would form a map of our understandings and misunderstandings. So we had better face up to this and make it coherent. We needed a Deus ex Machina for this of course. But don’t worry; we had one in mind. We had lots of things in mind for poets and everybody else in the GB to do on our behalf.

 

ENTER BIDDY JENKINSON

People – there are at least two of us – enjoy thinking of Biddy Jenkinson in terms of Jacobean stage directions and the like:

- Enter with a heart upon his dagger.

For example. Or at least like that Angela Carter mother in The Bloody Chamber riding to the rescue on a very large white horse, coat tails flying, villans scattering. The reason we fantasize about Biddy entrances is that her work, if somebody else had done it, would definitely involve declarations, manifestos, splashes and very grand entrances. But she never makes them. Biddy is usually there, just there. You don’t realise how she got there; you noticed nothing at the time; but there she is. This Lough Derg sign has just been visited by Biddy. You could never tell, could you? And you have to work out why the arrows pointing in opposite directions to the same drive both make sense. We dream on.

There is no evidence that Biddy herself approves of any of this or takes even the slightest pleasure in it. But the rest (the two) of us enjoy sitting back and watching her change almost everything while apparently doing nothing but write. Biddy is an earthquake. People think that what they’re feeling is a civilised and agreeable tickling sensation where the balls of their feet used to be. But the ground is moving all right.

The Dindshenchas business was obviously – to me – A Job for Biddy Jenkinson. Which implies, obviously, an entrance of the Demon King kind, flashing lights and the smell of burning. Which, as you know by now, do not happen with her.

 

It started with Aodán MacPoilin on the phone – you’ll meet him later. He was telling me things while I imagined I was getting him to tell me things. Aodán is from Belfast and he knows things and if you ask him right he will tell you, usually, exactly what you want to know - an unusual habit. Not saying too much is part of what he does very well. After the phone call I thought that my superior and highly sensitised nose had scented one of two things of great importance. One was Gearóid MacLoughlinn and the other was Biddy Jenkinson.

Biddy Jenkinson, he said, spoke Irish with a Dublin accent. I immediately imagined a young roaring woman from The Coome, sounding a bit like Biddy Mulligan – for, unfortunately, obvious reasons - and dismantling the inverted accent snobbery of Irish Gaeldom with every syllable. I was pleased. In school we were taught to sound as close to Munster farmers as we could get. This was never very close. Our teachers were Christian Brothers and all of them were, apparently, the sons of Munster farmers and they found our failure to be like them culpable but acceptable. There was an ideal, but it was being offered to us only so that we could fail to achieve it. We were to be sinners in Gaelic and that would be all we needed to know.

So - post Aodán - I phoned Biddy for the first time. She lives in Cabinteely, suburban South Dublin, down the road from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and does not have the kind of Dublin accent I have or that Biddy Mulligan would recognise. She sounds like an educated Irish person, from Dublin but with the usual influences from elsewhere – Dublin people usually have extra-Dublin roots and Dublin purity is more or less the usual fantasy though unusual in that no Dubliner believes it or wants to; but plenty of other people do. It doesn’t really matter but it was interesting that she could be described as very Dublin just because she doesn’t sound like very Connemara, or anywhere else where they speak ‘Lovely Irish’. A Gaeltacht grunt will sometimes get you high marks when real eloquence in a Pale accent will get you nowhere.

Anyway, Biddy and I we got going and entered the emailing business and I think we forgot that the reason we were talking to each other in the first place was the film. If I thought I was capable of Method, this would be the method I’d like to be capable of – collaborative talk can’t only be about what it’s supposed to be about, it’s better off being about everything as well.

Biddy has experience of the wider Irish world – diaspora Ireland and its many strange translations; and so have I, though mine is more or less confined to Willesden Green, Hillington and the like. We both have Rose of Tralee stories. The Rose of Tralee is an Irish beauty competition and she was once a judge, or related to a man who was. We don’t have beauty competitions, of course, so this is a wholesomeness competition where the most beautiful girl wins - because of her wholesomeness. It’s like beauty being truth, like truth being beauty and very very like that being all ye need to know. Stick a ‘lads’ on the end of that and you’re reminded of how dogmatic all unacknowleged legislators can be - Keats as Parish Priest.

 

Biddy has the brass neck to suggest to me that the Rose of Tralee derives ultimately from Mis, whom Biddy has been writing, or re-writing. Her poem in the GB is her Song of Mis at the Winter Solstice. Mis is a female Mad Sweeney in the ancient literature; she’s mad, lives from tree to tree and speaks in poems.

I assume Slemish (Sliabh Mis – the hill of Mis) by Broughshane is named after Mis. There is a Sliabh Mis in Kerry and I wanted Biddy to map out and claim a chain of Mis placenames as a sort of female gazeteer on ancient Ireland. Isn’t this what she’s doing with everything? Taking things apart all the better to rebuild them?

 

And why should Sweeny get all the literature? – Flann O’Brien, Heaney, Ó Searcaigh, MacLochlainn and probably too many others to remember now. There was a time when everybody had to do their very own Sweeny. Some of them are still busy.

Biddy gives me the story: Mis, drank the blood of her dead father after a battle against the Fianna, became a gealt, like Mad Sweeney and lived for 300 years on Sliabh Mis, the hill overlooking Tralee, Co. Kerry, killing everyone who came near her and devastating the countryside.

The King of Munster offered a reward for her capture. All candidates failed and were eaten till the king’s poet Dubhrois took off his clothes and took out his harp and played on the hill. Mis was impressed by the music. When he gave her bread she remembered civilization. His naked condition interested her and when he told her about the powers of his magic wand and ivory eggs she decided to allow him to show her what they could do. She was impressed by his tricks. She caught a deer which they cooked in a trough of water heated by stones from the fire.

Afterwards they bathed in the soup and Dubhrois rubbed the hair and feathers from her with a scrap of deerskin and she rose from the bath in such beauty that she set the standard for feminine perfection in Kerry till this day. Dubh Rois was killed and we have a lament for him, attributed to Mis, that begins ‘Dubh Rois do ba ríoga a ghnúis’.

I get over-excited. Stumbling along behind Biddy, I hope to see the whole of Ireland being re-named, re-mapped poetically. There is an old Irish text called Agalamh na Seanórach – The Conference of the Ancients, where St Patrick and Oisín go around the island re-naming each place, a post-pagan Dinnshenchas – the church re-branding the old places in terms of the new religion. The Ordnance Survey did the same thing on behalf of the British Empire. Now it’s Biddy’s turn.

Now, I’m inclined - very inclined - to run away with notions like this and the bigger the better. Also I’m inclined to keep them to myself for too long so that, by the time I mention it to the person I’m counting on to put the notion into effect, it has grown far beyond being explained to anybody else.

This time I get out the maps and go around the names on my own. I knew of some because of Belinda Loftus’s book Mother Ireland and Loyalist Ladies, where the Paps of Anu (on the left) look very female and very like the sort of thing the filmics will go for, even though they are in Kerry - a long way away - and I am beginning to learn how little actual filming time even film budgets can afford.

Biddy is not saying no. In fact we get into a correspondence about this and other placename things and I get even deeper into the placenames themselves. And we are talking about some of the best mountain experiences in Ireland, which must count as sufficiently visual, even for a TV film, mustn’t it?

The mountains of Ireland are hard to explain to people who come from places where they have real ones. I’m married to a Greek who cannot bring herself to call them mountains at all and has been known to giggle at the sight of one. I refuse to see what she means of course. Our mountains may be different but they will do us fine. They don’t do grandeur, or not with any seriousness; neither do we, I hope. Even the most magnificent of them have a kind of modesty. Errigal takes its own beauty for granted. There must be something about Croagh Patrick that invites all those pilgrims to climb it in bare feet, something friendly.

Irish mountains have character, sometimes they are characters – the kind of characters you’d find years ago loitering in the vicinity of pubs during the holy hour. The gods who live there are more like us than the Greek mountain gods are like anybody I’ve ever met. I mean, if you met Mad Sweeney you wouldn’t be afraid, would you? You’d probably buy him a drink. Zeus? You’d have to rush home and lock up your daughters.

Slemish has a face on it like a Belfast drunk, all knobbles and lines and bulges with histories – a friendly though peculiar mountain in a landscape full of domesticated drumlins. And if St Patrick really herded goats there, it must surely have taught him a thing or two. So it would be a very fine thing if Slemish were really a Mis mountain, and female.

My favourite Slemish approach is the B94 from Ballyclare to Broughshane, not a road anybody is likely to invite you to travel on. There’s a Kells off to the west, but never mind. This way you avoid Ballymena and you get pure Slemish and a long, straight lovely road, comfortably settled all along. The first time we stayed around here the local factor - Stanley again - having been told we were arts people assumed we’d be painting Slemish day and night. Windows in the cottage pointed themselves towards it and Stanley was proud of it. You’d almost be inclined to think he, Black Paisleyite Prod that he was, belonged there.

Eventually, I tell Biddy about all my plans for her and she almost disappears on me. She’s not a manifesto writer. She has attitudes and opinions that someday the critics will certainly build a few houses of cards upon. But she is sure as hell not building a Biddy museum in her head; she’s writing; and she doesn’t want to assemble it all into a system or anything like it.

It seems that one of the advantages of being noticed and ignored in the way Gaelic poets are is that critics do not often push them into constructing personal poetic philisophies. On the whole, they write, get read or not read and that’s that. The kind of pressure that Heaney has suffered - to be a spokesman, to be committed, to be a figurehead - has not happened to the poets in Irish. Even Cathal Ó Searcaigh – exhuberantly Gay - has been left to be as Gay or un-Gay as he likes.

Jenkinson has been using this freedom and extending it – by using a pen name; by avoiding the literary cattle market; by, I think, not paying much attention to what people say about her writing except to be embarassed when it’s as complimentary as it should be.

In the meantime she has been changing everything – in her usual way, by claiming to be changing nothing; or rather not be claiming to be changing anything, or not deliberately. As our film went on I watched her cause orderly havoc all over the literary map and the other map as well; heard of her asking for a Bosnian dictionary in Sarajevo before they managed to re-brand their old Serbo-Croat ones.

I thought the placenames thing was a pity for a while. But I did enjoy it while it lasted and it probably should have been part of another film entirely. And I did realise that it would complicate things to attempt a new Dindshenchas of the whole country while still trying to place the poets where they live. And so I kept quiet with Biddy, hoped she wouldn’t exit our film pursued by a rogue Dindshenchas and we moved on to Biddy’s songs, her prose, her cooking – none of which our film had a prayer of even mentioning. Mainly, we kept on talking, which is always a good thing.

 

DINDSHENCHAS AGAIN

But I am still stubborn on the basic Dindshenchas question. The work of every poet, I think, implies a Dindshenchas and I wanted this to be the centre of how we would film every poet. It was often complicated and not included in the mythology that surrounds some of them. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is a Kerry poet - Dingle all over. But she lives in Cabinteely right in the middle of the jungle of the Dublin suburbs. Máire Mhac an tSaoi also writes out of the language of the Dingle peninsula but she lives on the Howth peninsula watching over Dublin Bay. They are Kerry poets, but they write also about what they live with and where they are. Mhac an tSaoi has enormous international experience, Nuala speaks Turkish.

So I accepted the irrelevance of my placenames folly and made up my mind to try not to frighten poets and to try to remember that the film should be about them and the artists and not about some conceptual sandcastles I might feel like building from time to time. They would not have to overtly subscribe to the Dinshenchas thing; but the film could just do it, couldn’t it?

It wasn’t so difficult. When a film is moving, it really moves; and we were still doing our circuit of poets, places and artists; and having experiences.